I write line by line, by the sound and the weight and the music of the words.
Jayne Anne Phillips
I work via the high-tension-wire method, which is maybe going for long periods without writing while the tension builds up - when am I going to write this, am I going to be able to write this, what is this image about - and I'm thinking about it all the time, but I'm not really inside it, inside the writing.
It's my theory that many writers were the confidantes of one or the other parent. I was my mother's confidante; she had been her mother's confidante.
That whole business of having two homes, and that divided loyalty bind that kids get into. I mean, my parents were divorced - though I was adult - but I still grappled with being responsible to both of them.
I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.
I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.
Character and story are suggested by the voice in the words themselves.
I don't do much rewriting, because each paragraph is very carefully put together.
I don't investigate things by writing about them, but let them build up inside of me.
Divinity. That's what I'm trying to get at, in everything I write.
I see my work as a continuum, moving from book to book.
I don't write a novel every two years.
I tell my students that being a writer is like being a member of a medieval guild and that what we are doing is very subversive and very important.
I wish I had more time to write.
Books about women and children are not valued in the same way as a book about war. And why is that? I don't know.
I think we really forget how connected we are to the past.
Writing provides no guarantees. And writers who stay with writing do it for reasons that are larger than self.
